India’s Jamnagar refinery, via Wikipedia . Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The world consumes over 100 million barrels of oil a day. As of 2023, oil was responsible for 30% of all energy use worldwide, higher than any other energy source (though its share has been gradually falling). In chemical manufacturing, petroleum is even mor...

I just released LLM 0.32a0 , an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I've been working towards for quite a while. Previous versions of LLM modeled the world in terms of prompts and responses. Send the model a text prompt, get back a text response. import llm model = llm . get_model ( "gpt-5.5" ) response = model . prompt ( "Capital of France?" ) print ( response . text ()) This made sense when I start...

Chris Parsons has updated his guide on using AI to code . This is his third update, what I like about it is that he gives a lot of concrete information about how he uses AI, with sufficient detail that we can learn from him. His advice also resonates with the better advice I’ve seen out there, so the article makes a good overview of the state of using AI for software development. I wrote the previous version of this post in March 2025, updated it once in August, and it has been linked ...

Left: An artist’s depiction of the Chandrayaan 2 lander in lunar descent: Left inset: The Chandrayaan 2 crash site on the Moon; Right: The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan. Images: ISRO / NASA LRO On Chandrayaan 2’s landing failure Overview of Chandrayaan 2, India’s first Moon landing attempt Watching Chandrayaan 2 launch Explainer: Why did it take so long to find the Chandrayaan 2 lander? Chandrayaan 2, the orbiter to remember India aims for...

“The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can.” ― The Lord of the Rings Milford Sound is not only the most famous tourist spot in New Zealand, but also one of the world's top travel destinations, attracting up to 1 million visitors per year. It's often referred to as the 8th World Wonder. With such a reputation, my expectations were high. Despite its name, Milford Sound is actually a fjord rather th...

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was . Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git yet. And then, eventually, GitHub became the place, and I moved all of it there. It is hard...

We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values one by one, until we encounter the value, or exhaust the array. We sometimes call this algorithm a linear search. In C++, you can get the desired effect with the std::find function. For large arrays, you can do better with a binary search. Binary search is a classic algorithm that efficiently locates a target value in a sorted array by repeatedly dividing the search inter...

If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem 1 had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers. That design meant that the cellular modem fu...

A bit of a streamlined edition, this month. Lots of interesting links still, but less commentary. You can put that down to me prevaricating on getting my previous blog about Materialized Tables in Apache Flink finished, and leaving myself little time to work on this one :) Not including the detailed narration actually knocks a bunch of time off the preparation—I’d be interested in your feedback as to how much the absence of narration impacts (if at all) your enjoyment of reading it. Let me...

NEW DELHI (April 30, 2026) – Shield AI announced today the opening of an office in New Delhi to support its growing partnership and advance work with the Indian Ministry of Defence and its industry ecosystem. The latest milestone deepens the company’s long-term commitment to India. The opening was announced during a high-level visit to New Delhi by the president and co-founder of the company, Ryan Tseng, and a member of the company’s Defense Advisory Board, retired U.S. Navy Admiral John C...

The rise of coding agents has made it easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars a day in LLM tokens. This is a new class of expense, and it will change the future cost structure of software engineering. We are between stable equilibria today in SWE: the old one, of needing humans to drive any code change, and a yet-to-be-established new one, where AI agents write most code. Taking as a premise that AI agents will write a large fraction of code in the new equilibrium, we will nee...

The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites! You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter! Go directly to the Kickstarter . Read more on the Blog . The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites! You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter! Go ...

My favorite quote about networking came from Jim Kurose. The Internet works so well because it doesn't have to. The IP and lower layers of the internet stack make no promises of delivery. Complete failure fulfills the protocol. This allows for simpler and more powerful protocols without the extra complexity needed to guarantee success. TCP aims for delivery basically by restarting the IP communication when it fails, and even TCP can report failure to the layers above. We can say the same a...

I used to have this thought that optimizations in compilers and databases were a bit of a bandaid to badly-written code or something. I think this is not a correct mental model, though. I've also been trying to learn more about compilers recently, just because I have query planning problems that I feel like must have already been solved by the compiler world. So here's some musing. Languages like Rust benefit from compiler optimizations much more aggressively than other low-ish-level languag...

Introducing the compute unit- a modular and customizable desktop enclosure for small computers like the Latte Panda IOTA and the Raspberry Pi 5. I increasingly look to smaller and lighter compute platforms as the core of my lab infrastructure gets more refined. Sure, it's great to have a small datacenter at your disposal, but dealing with power, heat, and noise are really pretty terrible if they're in your living space. I always look at fanless or water cooled options since they tend to be far...

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Last Saturday I introduced the 250466 longboard from 1986 I bought for my Commodore 64 “Aldi” machine . I’ll admit, I could barely contain my excitement, for this was the first longboard C64 board I’d had in years. But does it work? Today I wanted to find out, and take a closer look at the ICs that make up this specific board. Before testing though, a few of you asked for a better comparison between the longboard and newer shortboard variants of the Commodore 64 motherboard. ...

How do mathematicians decide that something is true? They write a proof. Often they start with proofs that already exist, building on or drawing connections between proven claims. Each of these proofs, in turn, has relied on other proofs to make its point, and so on. Proofs upon proofs. Truths upon truths. But eventually this process must come to an end. At some point, things are true simply… Source How do mathematicians decide that something is true? They write a proof. Often they start wi...

Who knows that you blog? by David Jamieson David talks about his reluctance to share details about his blog with a colleague, and asks whether other people with blogs tell their friends and family. Read post ➡ I saw this post in my RSS reader this morning, followed by a reply from Alex , so I thought I'd add my own opinion to the mix. I'm similar to David and Alex - I'm not forthcoming with the fact that I have a blog, but I don't hide it either. I think that's mainly because most of my fri...

This week the article Wasm is not quite a stack machine has been making the rounds and has caught my eye. The post claims that WASM is not a pure stack machine because it has locals and is missing some stack manipulation operations like dup and swap . While I don't necessarily disagree, IMHO it's a bit of a semantic discussion because - to the best of my knowledge - there is no formal definition of what is a stack machine. Wikipedia, for example, says: [...], a stack machine is a com...

Every argument about internet regulation eventually turns into an argument about free speech and pornography. Unsurprisingly, the topic isn’t frequently discussed in undergraduate computer science classes or books on software engineering; I don’t have anything new to add, but here are a few things I’ve learned over the years. Every new form of media has gone through the same regulatory cycle with respect to pornography: initial criminalization, selective and often corrupt enforcement, an...

Respect your users and their confidence in you, “Microsoft” GitHub. Ethkuil , Updates to your GitHub Feed #65343 After years of waffling around I finally bit the bullet and migrated away from GitHub onto Codeberg and a private Forgejo instance. If Codeberg is good enough for Gentoo then it’s good enough for me. What’s the problem with GitHub? One part of my GitHub aversion is me being anti the big American tech corporations for ideological reasons. I’d lik...

After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 is finally here. That means it’s also time for another Asahi progress report! Automate Everything Users of alternate distros and keen-eyed individuals may have noticed some changes to the Asahi Installer. After almost two years, we finally got around to pushing an updated version of the installer to the CDN! Two years is a long time to go between updates, so what took so long? After almost three years of 6.x series kernels, Linux 7.0 i...